Just finished DMC1 in the HD collection and it has aged phenomenally. The atmosphere and the locations you travel through are always gloomy, the lighting particularly sets the mood. One minute you're a forest abyss, the next you're on a pirate ship.
The combat is simple when compared to the action genre now, but it's still incredibly tight and focused. Some enemy types are very acrobatic and at times they can have unpredictable attacks. The art design for the enemies is fantastic, could've done with less mannequin puppets though.
Boss fights were pretty great for the most part, albeit they had very noticeable weak spots or vulnerabilities to exploit. Towards the end though the game does stumble pretty badly, fighting a puke blob really wasn't interesting or fun, especially since most of it's attacks were throwing shit at the player.
Mundus is a pretty disappointing final boss, the first stage of the fight had no elements or tactics you learned throughout the game. A flying shoot'em up has no place in the game, that stage is over pretty quickly at least.
The second stage of the fight is much more annoying, projectile after projectile after projectile makes the fight feel really unbalanced and dull. I just spammed my purple devil star item and used a shield thingy to end the fight to quell my frustration.
Overall, a pretty great a action game to this day, even with it's simplicity.
I booted up DMC2 and had to stop playing it after 20 minutes. The vast emptiness of the environments combined with low enemy count and absolutely brain dead AI kill any potential fun. Added mobility moves to Dante's moveset don't matter when the enemies just stare at him and dance a little bit.
Now onto the king, DMC3.
